Medicine with Passion

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Technology and digitalisation: They don’t care…

Certain developments of medicine are absolutely disliked by us doctors. But wishing for something to disappear, doesn’t make it go away.

Technology and digitalization are here and they are here to stay. While in the last decades instruments of artificial intelligence mostly assisted and supported doctors, soon they’ll start to replace doctors.

Both of them don’t care, that doctors did an unbelievable job in the last decades.

Technology and digitalization don’t care that there are extremely experienced radiologists, who could discriminate bronchial carcinoma from calcification better than all of their colleagues. Very soon, Watson will take care of that. They are faster, have terabytes (meaning centuries!) of experience. Who wants to compete with that? Thanks radiologists, we don’t need you anymore.

Technology and digitalization don’t care that there are extremely gifted surgeons, who invested decades of their lifetime to learn one operation technique, which now they are the best at with the lowest complication rates. Now we’ve got the DaVinci, that sutures a grape in a freaking bottle. A bottle!! More precise results, less complication rates and they don’t sleep. And we shouldn’t fool anybody, especially not ourselves: Today, everyone is saying they don’t want to be operated on by a robot. That’ll change, once patients figure out how much better they are at operating.

My generation of physicians denies and fights the possibility that doctors will be replaced by robots.

The next generation of physicians will spend most of the time teaching robots to be, think and act like a physician.

The really exciting question is, whether after that we’ll need human physicians how we know it. I don’t have an answer. But I doubt it.